Practice forced to offer £20,000 'golden hello' to recruit partner

Exclusive The deepening GP recruitment crisis has forced one practice to offer a £20,000 bonus to attract potential candidates after struggling for a year to fill a vacant partner post, Pulse has learnt.

The Thorne Moor Medical Practice - which has a 100% QOF achievement score, and is situated in a ‘relatively leafy, affluent’ part of Doncaster, South Yorkshire - has had to take the step as a result of a recruitment crisis, which the LMC says is affecting one in ten practices in the region.

Elsewhere, one council is funding homebuilders to reduce the cost of houses for GPs in an attempt to attract practitioners to the area.

Dr Joe Firth, partner at Thorne Moor Medical Practice, said he had struggled to get any quality applicants over the past year and potential candidates were unwilling to commit to the job.

He said: ‘Over the last three months we have been one GP down, struggling along, so we put out this advert. The main thing about this “golden hello” is to try and encourage people to actually commit to staying.’

‘Because we are a reasonably good practice we tend to get at least one or two applications, so we could at least fill a post, but most are not bothered about staying or committing, they just go. So what we are aiming at is that over the course of three years there would be a £20,000 bonus on top of their salary.’

He said the recruitment problems come despite the practice being second in the country for patient satisfaction in last year’s survey, achieving 100% QOF scores and being situated in a relatively affluent, leafy area.

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Doncaster LMC medical secretary Dr Dean Eggit said the recruitment problem had now deepened to the point where practices were forced to resurrect the practice of offering ‘golden hello’ payments to get GPs to join them, a practice which he understood to be dormant since the 1990s.

He said: ‘Four [out of 44] practices in Doncaster have had long term recruitment and retention problems.’

‘My last understanding of the “golden hello” was that it was used in the early 1990s, when there was exactly the problem that we are starting to get to now. Patient demands and expectations cannot be met, so there are long working hours et cetera. There are not enough doctors nationally.’

Meanwhile, a housing developer in Carlisle has offered GPs a discount on home-buying in a bid to attract them to the areas in which it is currently building.

In an offer open until March next year, Story Homes is offering a £1,000 discount for every £50,000 spent by GPs on its developments in four areas of the town, in a joint scheme with the local authority.

The company explained that it has made the offer because families buying homes in their developments will want to know they can see a nearby GP.

A spokesperson said: ‘We are an aspirational company building aspirational homes for families and through our sustainable activities we aim to make the communities in which we build great places to live.’

Obviously , there are reasons why a GP partner is important in here. It will be interesting to have the opinion of those who support GP federation (whatever definition) and an universal salaried contract......

In 2006 a "golden hello" of £12,000 got me through the door of a deprived inner-city practice, in 2014 it isn't going to be easier in some areas.... Emigration to Australia or Canada is decidedly more attractive than staying in the UK.

If there are any bright eyed and bushy tailed new GPs left, how do you "pitch it"...

"Come and join us..., we have efficient 12 hour days seeing 50 patients (tel calls and home visits not included), at this surgery we acquiesce to patient demands to cover 4+ problems in 10mins (fearing criminal charges for ‘wilful neglect’ for missing any we don't cover THAT day)

...we do Extended Hours some Saturday's, keep paperwork to a minimum of 3 hours per day and our meetings now have 3 pages of agenda items to focus our minds.

We expect you to offer the partnership fair share workloads meeting all requirements of the CQC, Area Team, CCG, NICE guidance, QUIPP, QoF, Patient Panel etc. in one acrobatic juggling act (esp when 2 Partners are on holiday or off sick again).

We might not keep you so please do continue to commute from upto an hour away (but no further as we have a premises alarm rota - cheaper than a third party monitored service).

The £20,000 golden hello will be subsumed after 2 years into your negative "current account" balance so you may think twice about leaving us before a full parity partner re-interview. The latter will depend on how many back-office staff we manage to lay off (without Employment Tribunal risks) and the level of our premises expenses and how worse other financial risks look like in 2 years time.

I think we ARE in the middle of a crisis but Mr Jeremy (C)hunt cannot admit it.

NOTE- I can only hope the LMC secretary has been a little misquoted, as the Golden Hellos were paid for by GOVERNMENT. He might be accidentally giving the impression practices paid it, as this one seems to be doing.